Busy Weekend

Thanks to the help of my friend Tom I was able to finish the majority of the concrete work I wanted to do in the basement. There are still a number of small projects left but the bulk of it has been taken care of.

Slab: At some point in the past the house was extended about three feet to one side. In the basement you could see the original footing, a gap filled with dirt and then the plank-form poured wall. Tom and I poured a small portion of the slab by hand to see how it would come out and were pleased:



I neglected to take "before" pictures but I took some photos of what was left to do to give you an idea:



Its quite a mess to have that much soil in your basement. So we dug it out back filled with some rocks (to save on concrete and cash):





but I realized that mixing bag by bag would take a while. So I bit the bullet and had a truck come and I shuttled the concrete in as Tom spread it around. We had to tear out the "door" to the basement to allow the wheelbarrow to fit, but I had plans on rebuilding the "door" anyway. While we had formed up the lower part of the original footing (not level) we didn't think to do the whole thing so it didn't come out as well as we might have hoped. I'm going to go back and finish the edge a bit with some premix, but for now it will do. The idea was the keep the moisture down and to build some storage.





The big bump is an enormous rock that was very much a part of the original footing. That same footing has a number of supports holding up the original and still load bearing wall, so I didn't want to mess with it. If you look closely there area couple small bumps as well and those were also rocks that were sunk into the original footing.